2008 Annual Report of the National Endowment for the Humanities

200808 ANNUAL REPORT NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES CHAIRMAN’S LETTER The President The White House Washington, D.C. 20500 Dear Mr. President: It is my privilege to present to you the 2008 annual report of the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the White House in February, I joined President Bush and Mrs. Bush to launch the largest and most ambitious nationwide initiative in NEH’s history: Picturing America, the newest element of our We the People program. Through Picturing America, NEH is distributing forty reproductions of American art masterpieces to schools and public libraries nationwide—where they will help stu- dents of all ages connect with the people, places, events, and ideas that have shaped our country. The selected works of art represent a broad range of American history and artistic achievement, including Emanuel Leutze’s painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware; Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party; the Chrysler Building in New York City; Norman Rockwell’s iconic Freedom of Speech; and James Karales’s stunning photo of the Selma-to-Montgomery March for Voting Rights in 1965. Accompanying the reproductions are a teacher’s guide and a dynamic website with ideas for using the images in the study of American history, literature, civics, and other subjects. During the first round of applications for Picturing America awards in the spring of 2008, nearly one-fifth of all the schools and public libraries in America applied for the program. In the fall, the first Picturing America sets arrived at more than 26,000 institutions nationwide, and we opened a second application window for Picturing America awards that will be distributed in 2009. Working in concert with other federal agencies, the NEH was also able to bring Picturing America to all 20,000 Head Start learning centers nationwide, Department of Defense schools at home and abroad, and select National Park Service sites. While Picturing America was a focal point of attention this year, the NEH continued its work to promote excellent humanities scholarship, education, and public programming through its core programs. As the Endowment’s efforts in the digital realm matured, we announced the transforma- tion of our Digital Humanities Initiative into a permanent Office of Digital Humanities, or ODH. Among its many accomplishments in 2008, ODH inaugurated new collaborative grant programs with peer agencies in the United Kingdom and Germany, and launched a new initiative to explore how supercomputers can be used for humanities research. All of NEH’s widely varied initiatives and grant programs are united by a single, overarching purpose: to democratize the humanities and make their insights available to every American citizen. The humanities are not mere luxuries, or amusements for idle moments. They are ever-renewing gifts that enlighten and enrich the lives of every citizen—and the wisdom they offer is essential to the health of our democracy. Through its good work, the NEH continues to make a vital contribution to our national life, to our quest for truth, and to the great conversation of our civilization. BRUCE COLE Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................................... 3 Jefferson Lecture ............................................................................................................ 4 National Humanities Medalists ....................................................................................... 6 Division of Education Programs ..................................................................................... 8 Division of Preservation and Access ................................................................................ 14 Division of Public Programs ........................................................................................... 26 Division of Research ...................................................................................................... 31 Office of Challenge Grants.............................................................................................. 39 Office of Digital Humanities ........................................................................................... 43 Office of Federal/State Partnership ................................................................................. 46 Miscellaneous Grants ..................................................................................................... 54 Panelists......................................................................................................................... 55 National Council on the Humanities ............................................................................... 70 Senior Staff .................................................................................................................... 71 Budget Appropriation ..................................................................................................... 72 TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 INTRODUCTION In order “to promote progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts in the United States,” Congress enacted the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. This act established the National Endowment for the Humanities as an independent grant-making agency of the federal government to support research, education, and public programs in the humanities. In fiscal year 2008, grants were made through the Federal/State Partnership, four divisions (Education Programs, Preservation and Access, Public Programs, and Research Programs) the Office of Challenge Grants, and the Office of Digital Humanities. The act that established the National Endowment for the Humanities says, “The term ‘humanities’ includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.” The National Endowment for the Humanities supports exemplary work to advance and dis- seminate knowledge in all the disciplines of the humanities. Endowment support is intended to complement and assist private and local efforts and to serve as a catalyst to increase nonfederal support for projects of high quality. To date, NEH matching grants have helped generate approxi- mately $2.03 billion in gift funds. Each application to the Endowment is assessed by knowledgeable persons outside the agency who are asked for their judgments about the quality and significance of the proposed project. Seven hundred and thirteen scholars, professionals in the humanities, and other experts served on 161 panels throughout the year. INTRODUCTION 3 JEFFERSON LECTURE On May 22, 2008, writer John Updike presented the 37th annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC. His topic, “The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art?” wove a thread of ideas through the works of American artists from John Singleton Copley to Jackson Pollock. “Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things,” said Updike, “William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that ‘for the poet there are no ideas but in things.’ No ideas but in things.” He continued, “The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.” His pen rarely at rest, John Updike has been publishing fiction, essays, and poetry since the mid-fifties, when he was a staff writer at the New Yorker. “Of all modern American writers,” writes Adam Gopnik in Humanities magazine, “Updike comes closest to meeting Virginia Woolf’s demand that a writer’s only job is to get himself, or herself, expressed without impediments.” Updike has had a sustained interest in art, beginning in childhood when he had his first drawing lessons. At Harvard he took art classes with Hyman Bloom, a painter who was associated with a style known as Boston Expressionism. Then a Knox Fellowship gave Updike the wherewithal to study for a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. Painting had taught him, he once said, “how difficult it is to see things exactly as they are, and that the painting is ‘there’ as a book is not.” In Just Looking, 1989, and Still Looking, 2005, Updike gathered the impressions he’s been making over a lifetime of observing painting and sculpture. In an essay in the former he captures in limpid prose Vermeer’s achievement in paint in View of Delft: “an instant of flux forever held.” And in the latter, in a chapter on Jackson Pollock, Updike glimpses, and so we do, too, the essence of what Pollock’s drip-painting could accomplish—“an image, in dots and lines and little curdled clouds of dull color, of the cosmos.” About

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